


The formula of love

by Hotaru_Tomoe



Series: The English job [5]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Fluff, Halloweenlock 2016, Love Confessions, M/M, Pumpkins, Pumpkins carving, sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-31
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-28 04:32:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8431972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hotaru_Tomoe/pseuds/Hotaru_Tomoe
Summary: Sherlock, John, some pumpkin carving and a bizzarre love declaration.





	

_She said, "Tell me something nice."_

_He said: "(∂ + m) ψ = 0"_

  


One autumn morning, Sherlock woke up smelling a spicy scent.

He stretched and winced as his muscles protested: the night before, after solving a difficult case, he had fallen asleep on the couch, and maybe he was getting too old for that.

"Ah, shit - John said with a sheepish voice - I knew it: last night I should have woke you up and took you to bed, but you were sleeping so deeply that I didn’t have the heart to do it."

John was standing in front of him and was holding two paper cups, that he had just bought at Speedy's, obviously.

"No problem" Sherlock pulled back the blanket with which John had covered him and sat up. "What have you got there? It's not coffee."

"No. Because Halloween is coming, the bartender convinced me to try the specialty of the season: Pumpkin Spice Latte."

Sherlock raised an eyebrow: "There’s pumpkin for real in there?"

"Yup."

"And milk."

"Look, the bartender assured me that kids go crazy for this stuff nowadays."

John handed one of the cups to Sherlock, the two looked at each other for a moment and then took a sip of their drink.

A second later Sherlock’s face contorted in distaste, while John, much less diplomatically, spat into the cup: it was too spicy, but at the same time sweet as molasses.

"Shit... sorry, it’s terrible."

"Well, it depends: this drink is so disgusting that it might cover the taste of arsenic or strychnine. It’s great if you want to kill someone."

"Good God, I think it’s deadly even without poison!"

They laughed loudly, then John poured the two drinks in the sink, while Sherlock was about to make tea.

"Sorry again, I didn’t want to ruin your morning."

"It’s fine."

After the failure of his marriage, John had returned to live with him in Baker Street, so it didn’t matter if sometimes John brought home disgusting drinks, or if he insisted more than usual for Sherlock to eat and sleep regularly: having John back with him it was an unexpected gift, a miracle happened when Sherlock was resigned to spend alone the rest of his life.

It was more than fine, but Sherlock had not found the courage to tell him. Yet.

As he poured the right amount of tea leaves in hot water, he thought that the moment was propitious: John seemed happy and relaxed since he was back, there was something new in his smiles when he looked at Sherlock, like a light.

John loved autumn a lot, because it was the time of the year when he could return to wear his hideous sweaters. Also, he spent more time at home, since it was too cold to go to the park to jog, so when he wasn’t on duty at the clinic, he sat in his chair, reading or updating the blog.

And maybe, one of those days, Sherlock could lift his eyes from the newspaper and say that...

"Is it ready?"

John's voice woke him from his reverie.

"Just a minute."

Sherlock poured tea for both of them, and after the first sip, John closed his eyes in pleasure.

"I will continue to bring home disgusting drink, if after I can have a tea so delicious" John joked.

"John, I..."

"Shit, I gotta run to work. Is it something urgent?"

"No, it's nothing."

"Okay, see you in the afternoon."

Sherlock sighed: morning wasn’t a good time for a declaration, as John was always in a hurry. Perhaps during afternoon?

 

Unfortunately that week Sherlock was busy with another very complicated investigation, which also saw him end up in jail for a night for having insulted Lestrade’s new chief; meanwhile the Flu season started and John was busier than ever at the clinic, so they hadn’t had many occasions to talk.

After the case, one afternoon John came home with five large pumpkins, and Sherlock looked at him as if he was crazy.

"Please, tell me you don’t want to repeat the experiment of the Pumpkin Spice Latte."

John laughed: "No, nothing like that. Molly asked me if I would help her to carve some pumpkins for the children's ward at Barts, and I couldn’t say no."

"Oh."

God, what a dreadfully boring thing.

Besides John had taken very seriously the commitment and was concentrated on the carving: that wasn’t the right time to talk, either, so Sherlock lay down on the couch sulking.

After two hours, John looked at his watch and swore.

"Christ, it's late, I didn’t think it would take so long.”

"You can finish tomorrow."

"No, I promised Molly to deliver the pumpkins tonight. Look, can you help me out with the last two?"

Reluctantly, Sherlock stood up and reached John at the kitchen table.

"It’s already emptied, you just have to carve something."

"What?"

"Whatever you want, use your imagination."

Sherlock wasn’t in a good mood and poured all his disappointment in the carving, cutting away pieces of pumpkin with bitter satisfaction.

"Sherlock, is it all right?"

"Naturally.”

After a while, John, perhaps worried by his prolonged silence, looked up from his pumpkin.

"Okay, let me see the progress of your… what the fucking, sodding hell is that?”

“It’s just a face, and you said me I could do whatever I wanted” Sherlock retorted.

"But this is… Sherlock, it’s horrible!"

Sherlock’s carving seemed to come directly from the nightmare of a strongly disturbed psycho, one who should have to spend the rest of his days in an asylum. It was just a face, yes, but it was contorted, grotesque and frightening. Carpenter would have loved it.

"Correct me if I'm wrong, John, but isn’t horror one of the mainstays of Halloween? And, from this point of view, I think that mine is a good work, as I’ve taken a cue from the rotting corpse that Molly showed me the last month."

John grabbed the base of his nose.

"Sherlock, these pumpkins go to a children's ward, full of children and babies! Do you really think is appropriate?"

The detective looked at his work: although it was very good, John had a point.

"You could take it to the narcoleptic’s ward: maybe it helps to keep them awake."

Sherlock feared that John was seriously angry with him, instead, hearing the joke, he began to laugh out loud until he had tears in his eyes.

"You're impossible" John said with fondness "Never mind, I'll tell Molly that I broke a pumpkin, these four will do."

And he went back to work to the last one, carving Toothless, a character from a cartoon, as he explained to Sherlock.

"You’re very good at this," Sherlock said.

"Years of practice with the scalpel" John joked.

"I don’t think it's just that."

"No, you're right: When Harry and I were kids, our parents had a kitchen garden, so during autumn there were always a lot of pumpkins and we had fun in carving them. It was one of the few happy moments in my family," he muttered, after a short pause.

“John…”

“Well, I should go now, Molly is waiting for me.”

“Sure.”

“Do you need something before I go?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, don’t wait up for me: after dropping the pumpkins to Molly, I’ll go to the pub with Mike.”

“Right. Have a good time, then.”

Once John had left, Sherlock mused: if he had no luck with words, pumpkin carving would do it.

And he knew exactly what to carve.

 

The next night Sherlock was pacing back and forth in his room, repeating to himself that he wasn’t nervous.

No, he wasn’t.

At all.

Okay, who was he kidding? He was very nervous.

John would be home soon and, in front of his bedroom on the second floor, he would find Sherlock’s pumpkin, lit from within by a small candle, and the carving in plain sight.

However, when the door of 221B opened, Sherlock froze: there was someone else with John, a woman,  and the two were talking about a reservation at the restaurant.

He hadn’t time to feel like a fool as he panicked, ran out of his bedroom and dashed up the stairs, grabbing the pumpkin, but then he realized that he couldn’t go down unnoticed, as John and the woman were already on the landing; he was trapped there, so he did the only thing he could: he went into John's room, opened the window and threw down the pumpkin.

He tried to not feel sorry about it, while his pumpkin landed on the ground: it was useless for John to see his carving, evidently he had already found another love interest, and of course it wasn’t him. And probably the smiles, the light in John’s eyes didn’t exist, it was all in his head.

"Sherlock? What are you doing in my room?"

"I... uh... I was looking for a charger, I can’t find mine."

"And do you search it out the window?"

"No, it's just that it seems to me that your room is too hot."

"Not at all. In fact, close the window, please, it's cold here. And about the charger, check the bathroom, last time I saw it there."

John opened the nightstand drawer next to the bed and took some medical journals.

"Donna asked me to borrow them" he explained, "She is a colleague of mine. Let’s go down, and I'll introduce her to you."

Donna was small, pretty, had a cute smile, and when she saw Sherlock, she extended her hand.

"You must be Sherlock, John always talks about you."

Sherlock didn’t answer, passed past her and locked up in his bedroom: he had faked to appreciate Mary in the past, but he couldn’t do that again. He didn’t want to. He wanted all the women to disappear from John’s life, he wanted for the two of them to be alone, he wanted to have a chance to speak his heart, just for once.

He curled up on the bed, feeling pathetic.

 

Donna had still her hand extended in the air.

"What happened?"

"Err, yes... nevermind. You know, he’s probably in one of his black moods. Shall we go?”

 

John returned to Baker Street two hours later. The dinner had been nice, but he had done nothing else but thinking about Sherlock and his behavior. He knew that his flatmate was mercurial, but the whole thing seemed too strange, starting from the charger excuse. And, besides that, it was a few days that Sherlock was about to say something to him, but then pretended it was nothing important, and John wondered if it was all connected.

Donna had asked him if he wanted to go up to her flat, but he had declined: he had known her for some time, but that evening he realized he didn’t feel anything for her, that there was any spark between them.

And having dinner with a smart, nice woman and thinking about Sherlock all the time, well… it said something, isn’t it?

Some drunk had left three empty beer bottles in front of the main door of the 221B, so he picked them up and carried on the back, to Mrs. Hudson’s bins. He stepped on something squashy and slimy, and looked at the ground.

"What the hell...?"

A pumpkin had exploded on the pavement, there were no other words to describe it: there were orange fragments scattered all around the ground, the bins, and even on the wall, as if someone had thrown down a pumpkin from a upper floor. John looked up and realized he was exactly below his bedroom window.

Was it that what Sherlock was doing in his room? Launching pumpkins from the window? The hypothesis didn’t perplex him that much: it could be some bizarre experiment linked to a case (but it was strange that Sherlock hadn’t mentioned it to him), but then he saw that a big chunk of the pumpkin was intact, and there was a carving on it.

(∂ + m) ψ = 0

It looked like a mathematical formula of some kind: John reached into his memory, but the equation was unfamiliar to him, so it had nothing to do with medicine.

He searched for that formula on his phone and discovered that it existed and had a name: the Dirac equation.

Uh, quantum mechanics, definitely not his field.

The equation was incredibly popular even if it belonged to a so complicated science, and there were thousands of links talking about it. Intrigued, John clicked on the first one.

And he was speechless.

"Idiot," he muttered, after he read "You bloody, wonderful idiot."

John picked up the carved piece, and another smaller piece for himself, and went in. He paused only for a moment in the kitchen, took a knife and shaped his piece, then knocked on the door of Sherlock bedroom.

“Go away” came the muffled reply, but John ignored it and walked in. Sherlock was lying on the bed and his back was turned to him.

“Hey.”

“You’re home early. Not a good evening, I assume.”

John looked at the equation on the pumpkin and smiled.

“I wouldn’t say so.”

“How?”

Sherlock lifted his head, saw what John was looking at, and paled.  
"I was thinking... but it's obvious that you... you were with her, so... please, forget and leave," he stammered, sinking back his head in the pillow. He had never been so at loss for words and, God, it was humiliating.  
Sherlock felt the mattress sag when John sat down.  
"Do you really want me to go,without knowing my answer?" he asked in a quiet voice.  
"What answer?"  
"The answer to your carving. Mind that I don’t understand anything about quantum physics, so it's a simpleton answer, but if you want, it's here."  
John stretched out his right hand to Sherlock: on the open palm there was a little piece of pumpkin, heart shaped.  
"John…”

Sherlock's fingers brushed the small heart with awe.  
"Since I came home, I feel good, I feel happy. When I lived with Mary, it was never like this, not even in the good days. She wasn’t my system, neither Donna is, or any other woman. You are my system, the system that is connected to me. "  
"John, I..."  
"Indelibly" John added, before closing his eyes and place his lips to Sherlock’s.

**Author's Note:**

> The principle behind the equation Dirac says that: "If two systems interact with each other for a certain period of time and then are separated, they can no longer be described as two distinct systems, but in some way, they become a single system.”


End file.
